


How to Tame an Orange

by yamyamyam



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Citrus smooching, Disrespecting IKEA, Flu Shots, Fruit bowls, HIPAA compliance, M/M, Sam has fucking had it with these two, That could be a thing, Up all night to get Bucky (Marvel), what
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 18:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17751086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yamyamyam/pseuds/yamyamyam
Summary: Bucky gets a flu shot.Steve gets a fruit bowl.Sam gets a headache.





	How to Tame an Orange

Bucky's living in New York again. It's a risk; Steve is here, and Steve has already followed him a hell of a lot further afield than Bucky ever thought he would. It's been making more and more sense to him the more he remembers - the more he realizes how much was left out of that museum exhibit - but he's still not ready to reciprocate. Not yet.

But he's back in New York to work on it. In Europe he just kept triggering memories of missions, long-range shots and up-close knifework, bombs and garrottes and messages delivered in pain. Of the chair; the chairs, of 70 years of handlers, their casual cruelties blurring together. But here a lot of things bring up good memories, or neutral memories, or even bad memories but bad memories that are _his_ , from before the... from before. And Soldier memories too, of course; it's not like he hasn't killed a lot of people on American soil. His hands are red with the blood of every nation, including some he helped to crumble out of existence. But here mixed in with that there's a bit of peace to be found, bit by bit, piece by piece.

A fire escape: sitting out in the summer, smoking to try to forget about the sweaty heat, holding mostly still while Steve, tiny Steve, sketches him, or stops sketching when the heat gums up his breathing too much to concentrate on his sketchbook and he just lays back, looking at Bucky like he was the best flavour of ice cream in the shop.

A deli, not the one they used to go to, that's gone, but remember Mr. Coen's place? God what amazing sandwiches. His kid, what was his name, Avi. Avi went to their school a couple grades ahead of them, and his packed lunches were legendary, the underpinnings of a lucrative playground barter system.

The Brooklyn bridge is like a prize wheel at the fair - it's in the vague background of so many moments in his youth that he gets something new back almost every time he sees it. Walking home from work, exhausted and bone-tired, or at least what he used to think of as tired before he was made in to what he is now. The boxing ring at the Y; his little sisters in their braids & bows; playing scrub in the park; kissing on girls after a night at the dance hall.

Kissing on Steve, and that was never a bridge memory, that happened in a dozen furtive places with the shades drawn, the lights out, the coast clear. Those memories jump him in alleys, in hallways, between streetlights.

New York's a risk, but it's worth it.

=====

The risk catches up to him one night in a park. He's learning to love people-watching, enjoying letting the future wash over him without the hypervigilance of a stake-out. He's been a sniper for a long, long time; he can wait in coiled attentiveness for literally days on end. Learning to just let go of that, to swim in the lazy brownian motion of the city without being aimed as a weapon, is in large part the work he needs to finish to make himself ready to stop running. 

So he's on a bench in a park, and it's 11pm, so the crowd is thin, but it's New York, so it's not that thin. And there are 8 million souls in this town but suddenly he's face to face with Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson, 50 yards away, out eating 11pm hot dogs for some goddamn reason. Judging by the look on Steve's face, Bucky is in second place in the Noticing This Fact race and it's too late to play it cool and vanish. So, time to play it EXTREMELY UNCOOL and vanish. 

He's running flat out to the nearest edge of the park - and his flat out is really damn fast, but Steve can do faster, longer, just by a hair but that's enough, so Bucky's priority is to get out of sight ASAP. Up a fire escape - smoking, summers - across three roof tops - fireworks, stroking Steve's hair - in to an elevator maintenance room, down two floors - that stairwell in Marseille, where - out a window, cross the street, down an alley - focus Barnes, be. here. now. Around two more corners, and here, perfect, the entrance to a below ground level mall. Steve's a corner or two behind and won't see him enter, so it'll take him a while to check out the more obvious directions. Slow down, walk casual, shit, nothing's open, nothing's open - ah!

He stalks through the empty drug store, slipping past the gaze of the very bored-looking teenaged cashier, finishing at the pharmacy counter. He cuts off the pharmacist's greeting by showing her his gun with a "Let's not waste each other's time" expression before it disappears back in his jacket.

She puts her hands up, looking oddly calm. "Money or drugs?"

"I want a flu shot."

This disrupts her smooth expression. "A... flu shot?"

"A flu shot. Now." Winter Soldier staring intensifies.

"Uh... okay! Okay! Uh. Can you sit down over there and I'll just... the fridge..."

He's sitting politely in the chair she indicated when she re-emerges from behind the counter with a syringe and a vial.

"Show me the vial."

Her hands are trembling a bit as she passes it over. Influenza vaccine. No funny business. Okay. He passes it back. She draws up a dose and looks a bit lost. "I'll need to see the top part of one of your arms..." She reaches tentatively over to his left sleeve.

His left hand produces the gun again and he uses it to tap his right arm before disappearing it once more.

"Okay! Okay, uh, right side. Right. We can do right. Do you... do you have any allergies to medication?"

He glares nopefully.

She pulls down the collar of his shirt enough to expose the deltoid, gives one last nervous "Are you fucking with me, sir?" glance at his face, and... gives him a flu shot. She tosses the syringe in the sharps bin, presses a cotton ball down, swaps it for an Angry Birds bandaid, and is about to pull out a lollipop and a sticker on autopilot before catching herself and reverting to a hands in the air, non-threatening pose. 

"Thank you for acting as my medical professional today," he says pointedly, holding her gaze.

She blinks. "I guess you're not going to wait 15 minutes in case of allergic reaction, huh."

He gives her an ironic salute, vaults the counter, sails through the door to the store room, up the back stairs, and out to the alley and the night. 

=====

Steve tries again, pointing to a picture of Bucky, a slightly pixelated blow-up from the news coverage of DC. Laminated, because this is not the first time he's had this kind of discussion in two years of hunting for Buck.

"Are you sure you haven't seen this man? The night security guard says he saw him come in to the mall, and this is the only place open all night."

"I'm sorry, I can't say."

Steve puts on his very best earnest, national icon, shits bald eagles, sweats apple pie, you can trust me look. "Ma'am, whatever threat he might have made... we can protect you. We're with the Avengers." 

"No, it's not... it's not that. I get threatened all the time. I sell narcotics for a living, honey. I've been robbed at gunpoint twice this month." Is she rolling her eyes at him? This is not how this discussion usually goes.

He frowns. "Then... did you see him, or not? Why can't you answer?"

"HIPAA," she blurts out.

"Hippo? What?" Steve is going to need his own drugs soon to get through this conversation. Has Steve already _taken_ drugs to get through this conversation? _Hippos?_

Sam steps in. "HIPAA," he says, spelling it out. "It's a privacy law for health care workers, Steve. Like how I can't talk to you about what anyone at the VA tells me in counselling." He frowns and looks at the pharmacist. "Though I didn't think it applied to armed men randomly running through your store."

"It does if they're my patient."

Sam's mouth opens, then closes again. Sam decides he doesn't have a dog in this weird-ass race.

"I mean, hypothetically, would you want an armed, wanted criminal to be afraid to pick up their antipsychotic medication because they're worried the pharmacist will narc them out?"

Steve's mind has left the zoo and rejoined them. "He stopped to fill a prescription?!"

"I said hypothetically!"

"Ma'am," starts Steve. He's trying his best to be polite, to pour on the sugar, but his Aw, Shucks face has had anger management issues since 1918 and this is not its best night.

Sam places a hand on Steve's shoulder. "Let it go, man, we've lost him for now. Let's regroup."

"But--"

Sam gently but firmly turns Steve around and starts herding him out the door, calling over his shoulder "Your dedication to patient confidentiality is admirable, ma'am!"

=====

Three subway transfers later, Bucky's breathing a little easier, is pretty confident he can swing wide around and get back to his apartment for a more leisurely break down and move than he was fearing. 

He's a little disappointed that the pharmacist put down the sticker and lollipop, honestly, but it wasn't worth it to stick around and insist. The whole thing was a bit of an indulgence; he probably took more time getting the shot than he gained making them quiz the witnesses. But now that he's not the fist of Hydra, he likes adding a little flair to things. 

Oh well, whatever he sticks on his arm to cover up the star just ends up wearing off within a week anyway. Being an ex-assassin on the lam is hell on accessories. 

His right arm is already done being sore and he can't find the puncture site under the bandaid when he removes it. He wonders idly if he's up to date on vaccinations. There are so many in the future. Humankind has actually hunted some diseases to _extinction_. He's a little punchy after the chase and giggles to himself, imagining teeny weeny cavemen hunting teeny weeny mammoth-shaped viruses with ootsy bootsy spears. 

Would hydra have given him the works to protect their investment, or left him vaccine-free to test out the serum? Fuck, they probably injected him with super-measles and put him in an acid bath so they could graph the number of spots against the rate of screaming, that would be more on-brand for them.

...this is not a helpful direction of thought. Only memories he doesn't want to keep come from this kind of speculation. He hops off the train and makes for home, for the latest version of "home," anyway. His real home is 6'2" of blond supersoldier, but he's not done running away from home just yet.

=====

There are no traces of Bucky's passage behind the pharmacy, in the rest of the mall, hell in the ceiling vents of the mall. Clint came down to lend a hand with that part of the search, and other than taking a nap in one for half an hour - Steve had to stand next to an intake vent with a slice of pizza until the smell roused him - he was surprisingly efficient about it. Man knows his HVAC systems. 

Back at the tower, Steve places his head in his hands while Sam fixes some coffee.

"Of course we'd manage to find the only eye-witness in Manhattan who cares more about privacy than a gun to the face."

"Look, Steve, I'm disappointed too, that's the closest we've gotten in over a year." Sam looks solemn. "But I've got to be honest with you, that tiny little woman itching to start an argument with your giant ass over a matter of principle is _exactly what you deserve_ and I want to just frame the memory of her out-stubborning you."

Steve shoots Sam a look that could peel paint.

Sam smiles in to his coffee. Seriously, framing it. 

=====

Bucky's spooked by the near-miss in the park, but not enough to give up on New York yet. He moves out of Manhattan to a place in Brooklyn, to put a little distance between him and the Avengers tower, and to maximize the density of things that might jog his memory, to get as much as he can out of the experience in case he needs to move on again soon.

His worries spike up when Steve's pattern changes: he stops hunting for Bucky. Sam goes back to DC, seemingly indefinitely. Steve doesn't go out on any solo hunting trips, or shady visits to informants, or anything. And he... he gets an apartment in Brooklyn too.

Does he _know?_ But he can't - he's made no move to contact Bucky, hasn't been following him, hasn't been out searching in any kind of methodical way. Bucky knows this because he's been following him. Steve's just... living in Brooklyn now. Grocery shopping. Going for runs. Goes to Ikea one day. Bucky almost breaks cover to stop this; he has learned from painful experience that Ikea is Swedish for "Not Sturdy Enough For Supersoldier Nightmares." But Steve must have his own particle board trial by fire, Bucky's not ready to make contact yet.

Is he? He's not, right?

He's kind of stopped his own work of trying to remember. He sometimes forgets to bring his current notebook along with him on his Steve-following scouting forays, and there's no people-watching or building-watching or anything any more. 

Just... Steve. 

Always, only, Steve.

=====

Steve's losing patience.

Sam keeps telling him you have to have something before you can lose it. 

A lot of their phone calls lately end with Steve grinding out a put-upon "Very funny" while Sam cackles.

But Steve wants to give this a proper go.

Maybe Sam just suggested this because he needed a break from Steve after two years of riding the rails looking for Bucky, but the logic checks out on the face of it. In two years they hadn't gotten better than rumours and whispers and months-old traces. But now they know that Bucky is here, that he came to New York, and it can't be a coincidence that that's where Steve is, can it? 

Bucky's memory of Steve was enough to break through his conditioning, to push him to pull Steve out of the river, and it's been two years with no Hydra, no fucked up electroshock - Steve had been a weepy mess for weeks after they came to that part of the SHIELD release, the details of the Winter Soldier asset maintenance protocol - two years to remember.

Bucky was always Steve's. Steve was always Bucky's. If he's remembering anything, that's got to be in there, hasn't it? 

So Bucky's here. And Bucky does not want to be chased. If they didn't know that before, they just got served official notice with this last scramble.

So maybe Steve needs to just sit back and be here, be somewhere accessible that Bucky can creep closer to when he's ready. Like he's a stray cat or something. 

So, Steve moves out of the tower. The tower is too secure, too law-enforcement-adjacent, too full of Tony to be perfectly honest. Steve likes Tony plenty; they scrap but they're ultimately on the same side. But he's pretty sure he and Bucky would have some kind of high noon showdown if they weren't introduced properly, perhaps via skype from a distance of three or four thousand miles.

And he finds that he really likes living in Brooklyn again. Nothing's the same but everything is, too. The smells and sounds are completely changed from his memories from before the war, but the bones are there, the attitude is there, the variety of cultures and food butting shoulders with each other is there, albeit with a few new additions to the mix. 

Food has a magical, Christmas quality to it in his memory. Steve mostly grew up on stew stretched very thin - his ma did her best but her pay didn't go far, and after she died, the intermittent work he managed between illnesses didn't either. So the times when he had a deli sandwich, Bucky's treat; when the Barneses had him for a Sunday roast; when he scraped up enough for an orange to take home and split with Bucky, trading sour, sticky kisses after the last of it was gone... those times stand out. 

Steve could buy a roast every day now if he wants, and he can and does have three or four deli sandwiches for lunch several times a week. He feels so gluttonous about that, remembering how far that would have gone for his tiny, hungry past self, but he's a growing super-soldier and a single sandwich doesn't cut it anymore. He makes the mistake of mentioning it to Sam once and Sam pinches the bridge of his nose and says "Only you could feel guilty about stealing food from your remembered past self."

And oranges. You can buy oranges every day of the year now. When he feels particularly mopey and wants to wallow, he buys a bag of oranges and eats them all alone, kissing nobody.

He hopes Nat never finds out about that part, or the blind date offers will never, ever stop.

He's three months in now and still waiting for his stray cat to creep up to the porch and rub against his legs. Or even be a pair of shining eyes seen in the shadows every now and then.

Right. Patience.

=====

Strangely enough, though, it's Bucky who cracks first and sets out a bowl of cream. Sam would have put money, _so much money,_ on Steve giving up and going back to active searching before Bucky came to him, but maybe he's said so too many times, because Steve has camelled up and waited out the drought, probably out of pique.

Or love. That boy is restless as an ant hill when he has problems he can't punch, but he and Bucky go back forever, and maybe that's enough to overrule the rest of Steve's personality. Like a really violent Hallmark card.

In any case, 4 months in to Steve's Brooklyn tenure, Sam gets an excited phone call.

"HE LEFT ME A MESSAGE."

"Hello, Steve. Why, it's nice to talk to you too. I've been fine, thanks."

"Aw, hey, I'm sorry, I--"

"I'm just messing with you, shield maiden. He left you a note?"

"Well, no, not exactly a note. But it was him, for sure him. There was a bag of oranges on my table this morning."

"A bag of... oranges." 

"Yes! We used to... have oranges. Sometimes."

"Steve, I don't want to be a downer here, but... do you think maybe you bought the oranges? I've seen you buy oranges. You like oranges."

"Well I didn't buy _these_ oranges. Sam, I have an eidetic memory. I can keep track of my fruit."

Sam bites his lip for a minute, trying not to snicker. "Okay man, I believe you. So. Oranges. You have a secret orange admirer. What now?"

He can hear Steve slump against the wall. "I don't knooooooow!"

Now Sam does laugh. "Rogers, you sound like a tween in love."

Steve sighs heavily.

Sam takes pity on him. "How about you leave him a note back, wherever he left your orange-a-gram."

"Sam, you're the best."

"And yet they won't let me put that on my business card."

=====

The note stays on the table untouched for three nights, but on the fourth Bucky can't stand it any more and goes in to retrieve it. It must be for him, right? That's where he put the oranges before.

He's in and out in 35 seconds, and it's not until he's 8 blocks away that he pulls the note out to read it.

           _Bucky,_

           _Thanks for the oranges._

           ~~Do you remember when we used to~~

           _Never mind. I'm your friend no matter what you remember._

           _We don't have to talk if you're not ready._

           _But when you are, I miss you._

           _Steve._

=====

Steve buys a fruit bowl. From Ikea.

=====

This is stupid. Bucky knows this is stupid, to keep coming back, to be so predictable. If Steve wakes up this is going to be so... so... he doesn't even know. The idea of trying to deal with Steve right now is a singularity; he can't fathom the shape of the event or the options that come after, it's too overwhelming.

But there's a fruit bowl now. Steve _bought a fruit bowl_ just for him. That seems... so important somehow.

This is stupid.

He sneaks up on the fruit bowl. 

Bucky is a professional assassin, prepared to deliver a new bag of oranges with maximum stealth.

The fruit bowl never sees it coming. 

Steve does, though.

Bucky is creeping toward the window he came in through when the lights turn on. He turns in a flash, guns drawn almost automatically, suddenly wishing he'd brought a smoke bomb to cover his exit. 

Steve is... just standing there. Holding a piece of paper.

"Buck, I..."

Steve slowly advances on the table and sets the paper down, then backs away.

"I just wanted you to have that."

Bucky's face is blank as he approaches. He takes the note without looking at it, backs toward the window, and gestures with one gun at the light switch. 

Steve turns off the lights.

When he turns them back on a few minutes later, Bucky is gone.

=====

When Bucky gets home, heart pounding - stupid, stupid, stupid! - it takes him a while to even remember the note, he's so wound up.

By the time he does, he's already had a shower and a panic attack and then another shower.

It turns out not to be a note at all, but a sketch:

The living room, well, only room in one of their old dive apartments. Little Steve and him on their beat up couch, kissing, an orange rind on the kitchen table nearby.

Bucky sits down heavily. Steve's earlier note had been so careful to say just "friend." Bucky wasn't sure if that meant Steve didn't want... wasn't... look, Bucky knows he's pretty fucked up. He's beyond damaged goods.

But this.

This is a question. Do you remember? Do you still wanna? Were the oranges...?

And they were, is the thing. 

When Bucky bought them, he was only thinking that he'd seen Steve buy oranges on some of his grocery trips, that he'd seen him eat them as he watched him in his apartment from his perch across the street.

But on some level, hadn't he remembered?

Because looking at this sketch now, all he can think is _how could I forget_.

=====

Seven nights of an empty fruit bowl later and Steve is beyond morose. He just had to push it, had to put Buck on the spot. He couldn't wait, no, he had to knock down what he'd spent four months slowly working on.

The punching bags down the street don't last long this week. Steve's not sure how Carlo, the gym owner, stocks so many on the regular, but he seems happy to do it as long as Steve pays off his tab. Considering Steve's wealth consists of backpay from his job punching things, this seems like a fitting way to spend it.

He's still in a sweat-soaked t-shirt, hell his knuckles are still bleeding, although healing up even as he glances at them, when he opens the door on the eighth night.

To find Bucky sitting at his kitchen table. Bucky looks at the door pointedly and raises an eyebrow. Steve hurriedly shuts it behind him and gets back to staring.

Bucky waves him over to the other kitchen chair.

"Buck, wha--"

Bucky holds a finger over his lips. He passes Steve a note.

           _I'm not ready to talk._

Steve looks up. "That's okay, that's fine. It's nice just to see you."

Bucky takes out a knife.

Steve looks at the knife.

"Uh. Buck?"

Bucky produces an orange and carves out two slices.

He takes the note back and flips it over.

           _So I thought maybe we could do something else._

Steve's eyes widen and he looks up to meet Bucky's, their faces trading nervous and hopeful back and forth for a while until Bucky passes Steve an orange slice. He takes it in silence and starts to suck on it. Bucky has one too, but only gives it a cursory bite before standing up and bending down to frame Steve's face and they're kissing and kissing and kissing, orange rinds forgotten on the table, and oh. Oh. Oh, Bucky. 

Steve cracks open and starts leaking tears, and Bucky grips him in a savage hug, pressing Steve's head to his chest and stroking his hair. When his sniffling dies down, Steve wiggles loose and looks back up at Bucky through his long eyelashes and it's almost like he's small again and they're kissing for the first time. Bucky takes his face back in to his hands and they're kissing again, for the first time, for the last time, for every time in between.

=====

This is so much more than Bucky remembered.

How could he ever have forgotten? It doesn't matter any more. If he forgets again, Steve is here, alive and warm and safe, all those impossible things Bucky thought he had lost forever, had buried and mourned so many years ago. 

If he forgets again, Steve is here to remind him.

=====

It turns out, the next morning, that Bucky is ready to talk.

=====

Three days later there's pounding on the apartment door, and Steve, bleary-eyed for all that it's 1pm, stumbles over to make it stop. He opens the door.

"Steven."

"Sam! When did you get in to town?"

"Just now. _To see you._ What the hell is going on with you, man?"

Steve looks puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"You've been calling me like a lovesick 8-year-old every night for weeks, and then bam, nothing for days, you don't answer texts, you don't answer emails, your voicemail is full. I was _a little concerned._ "

"Oh." Steve pinks up and looks sheepish. "Sorry, Sam. I guess I was just... distracted."

Bucky walks out of the bedroom, in sleep pants and a too-small t-shirt that has to have been stolen from Steve. "Hey Wilson." He continues on to the kitchen to get coffee started.

Sam looks at Bucky. 

Sam looks at Steve. 

Steve looks at Sam. 

Sam looks at Steve harder. 

Steve looks at the floor. "Sorry," he mumbles.

Sam caves. "Aw, you're fine. But next time pretend you know what century it is and check your phone more often than once a month."

Bucky calls over from the kitchen. "Hey, you guys want pancakes?"

Now this is more like it, Sam thinks. Apology pancakes. "Hell yeah!"

Bucky walks over. "Great! Here's 40 bucks. Go find us some." He looks Steve up and down. "Don't come back too soon."

Sam looks at Bucky.

Bucky looks at Sam, smirking, an eyebrow cocked.

Sam closes his eyes.

"I hate you."

"Aw, I hate you too, buddy."

Steve can't stop smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/yamtimesthree), yellin' about Bucky usually.


End file.
